NGOs say they adapt to survive in China

While it is becoming clearer that Oxfam Hong Kong has fallen foul of the mainland's education departments, crucial questions remain unanswered, including what the charity has done to deserve such treatment and what it means for other NGOs on the mainland.

NGO activists have long described the environment for survival on the mainland as 'precarious' since most non-governmental organisations are technically illegal due to stringent registration requirements. However, many said this week that despite the apparent stepping up of government regulation of the NGO sector, as exemplified by the Oxfam incident, overall freedom for NGO work in the country had actually expanded.

There's a catch though: one must become an 'NGO with Chinese characteristics'.

'In China, to be a successful NGO, one must find the middle ground between maintaining independence, and working with the government,' said Wang Liwei, editor-in-chief of The Charitarian, a magazine on China's charity work and corporate social responsibility.

'Governing NGOs is still a new thing for the Chinese government, and currently the relationship is still rather like a song we have here: I want to love you but it's not easy,' Wang said. 'The trend is to welcome international NGOs, but it wants to keep NGO work under government leadership.'

While international NGOs have long been allowed into China and were pretty much ignored before due to their limited size and influence, they have been looked on more suspiciously in recent years, especially after the colour revolutions in former soviet states alerted the central government to the harm that international NGOs could do, experts said.